Dear Landmine_Mapper!

I have been watching your posts for a while now with a mixture of awe and impotence and shame. And I have been too overwhelmed to respond. But I want to respond and I will try :

First, I want to thank you for these posts. They are a mind-numbing testament to the brutality and injustice of so much of what was terrible about the 20th century and they are a warning (if only it were heeded!) for the 21st. Every one of your thousands of placemarks killed people below and is a silent sentinel for those lives extinguished, the children orphaned, and barbarism at its most shameful and cruel. Again, I thank you.

But I want to try and be practical. To discuss your use of the technology to convey the message that your posts could and should convey.

First, I guess, is the choice of forum. I can not understand why you would post this important and valuable data in the "Dynamic Data Layers" layer when I would have thought perhaps the "History Illustrated" would be far more appropriate. First, that is where the potentially interested audience for these posts would lie. And second because placemarks posted in "Dynamic Data Layers" will never show up on the Google Earth application whereas those posted in History will.

But this raises my second point : relating to the sheer mass of data that you wield. It is true that every one of your points is important in the sense that it indicates the scene of an act of terror perpetrated upon those below and killed and maimed god knows how many human beings. I do not want to take anything away from that. But the fact remains that, with the current state of technology and the capacity of most of our machines today the sheer scale of these posts is simply overwhelming. My machine, for example, slows to a crawl when confronted with this mass of data and, while every point is important, the danger is that people may just 'switch off' when confronted with the sheer enormity of it.

I am not conversant with KML and all that but I wonder whether there may not be some way to present your data (which I agree is important and valuable) in a more digestible format? Perhaps some kind of 'drill-down' way which would attract the attention of a Googler as they fly above the landscape and which, if clicked on, would reveal depper and deeper levels of detail? I don't know how to do this, but I think this would be the way to go. If your data was in the History forum it would be visible from above : but perhaps only as a limited number of points. And then, as the user zooms down into it, perhaps more and more points could be exposed until ultimately they see every last bombing run as you have collated it.

This is just and idea, and please don't take it the wrong way. I am trying to be constructive here; I would hate to see all your valuable research 'go to waste' if people never see it. As I said : I don't know how to solve the problem myself but perhaps there is someone more versed in the technology out there who could help. Again, I thank you for your work and your effort. I am sure that others out there feel the way I do.

- H.